seekingferret (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
seekingferret) wrote2018-02-25 12:59 pm
seekingferret) wrote2018-02-25 12:59 pm
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New Caroline Shaw piece commissioned by Mozart in the Jungle:
Say what you want about how great The Good Place is, and it's plenty great, but the one place Mozart in the Jungle has it topped is in original Caroline Shaw compositions. You hear that, Mike Schur? When are YOU going to commission a Caroline Shaw piece?
The words they use to describe the piece on the show: "The piece that she [Shaw] gave me is called "Hi" and it's about how she wishes we could all say Hi to each other with total explosive joy and realness... like a volcano of happiness and sorrow, or like a spaceship... but I guess you guys don't actually know what a space ship is, but like a spaceship you could take to the stars, and from there you can see everything."
I think that's about right. The music starts out in hi, in the interrogatories of meeting new people for the first time and sorting them out, and then when the instruments stop and the voices come together, Shaw attains something numinous and unexpectedly joyful. Also there are flower pots.
Say what you want about how great The Good Place is, and it's plenty great, but the one place Mozart in the Jungle has it topped is in original Caroline Shaw compositions. You hear that, Mike Schur? When are YOU going to commission a Caroline Shaw piece?
The words they use to describe the piece on the show: "The piece that she [Shaw] gave me is called "Hi" and it's about how she wishes we could all say Hi to each other with total explosive joy and realness... like a volcano of happiness and sorrow, or like a spaceship... but I guess you guys don't actually know what a space ship is, but like a spaceship you could take to the stars, and from there you can see everything."
I think that's about right. The music starts out in hi, in the interrogatories of meeting new people for the first time and sorting them out, and then when the instruments stop and the voices come together, Shaw attains something numinous and unexpectedly joyful. Also there are flower pots.
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(Weirdly, I know Caroline's family from when we all were kids -- her oldest brother and I are about the same age, so in my head she's still a tiny little kid. But I like her music quite apart from that.)
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I mean, bear in mind that Mozart in the Jungle is a really weird, uneven show. At its best, it sometimes hits the sublime peaks of storytelling about the confluence of life and art that Slings and Arrows hit (and Susan Coyne, one of the creators of S&A as well as the actress who played Anna, has written a number of episodes for Mozart in the Jungle, cementing the connection), but the show also has a kind of Wes Anderson sensibility and a silliness that often doesn't work for me. When it's on one of those tears, all I can really get out of the show is the music nerd jokes, which are pretty uniformly fantastic. There are AMAZING musician cameos, Joshua Bell and Lang Lang playing ping pong, Nico Muhly writing an Amy Fisher aria, etc... I always find myself bingeing the new season within a week or two of it coming out, and I don't enjoy everything, but there's always enough good music nerdery to satisfy me.
(That's really cool that you knew Caroline Shaw. I saw Roomful of Teeth live a couple years ago and they're just incredible live.)
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It's good to know about it being weird and uneven. I feel like that's the sort of thing I need to know about a show going in in the sense that it'll really bother me if I wasn't expecting it (and less if I know about it).
I'm not sure I know enough about the music nerd scene to get everything, but that does sound like it could be neat.